Forbes.com: Best Buy en Español Profits By Serving the Hispanic Market Better

Hispanic customers who shop on the web are giving their time and money to Best Buy in appreciation of its effort to speak their language. Best Buy offers an almost complete duplicate of its main English language website in Spanish at http://espanol.bestbuy.com/enes/.

As a result, Best Buy finds that users of its Spanish language spend twice as much time on the website and also spend twice as much money per visit. “Latinos are giving us credit in being leaders in the e-commerce space in services to them,” says Ana Grace, global web team product manager. As a Latino herself, whose family moved to the mainland U.S. from Puerto Rico when she was a child, Grace is proud of that result. “It’s definitely a passion point for me.”

Continued: http://blogs.forbes.com/davidcarr/2011/02/17/best-buy-en-espanol-profits-by-serving-the-hispanic-market/

Also available in Spanish (translation courtesy of MotionPoint): http://blogs.forbes.com/davidcarr/2011/02/23/best-buy-en-espanol-obtiene-beneficios-al-atender-mejor-al-mercado-hispano/

Fast Times At A Global Web Flower Shop (Forbes.com column on web performance and search optimization)

Commentary

Fast Times At A Global Web Flower Shop

David F. Carr, 08.13.10, 06:00 AM EDT

How daFlores speeds load times, boosts search engine optimization.

Francisco Bustos, president of the international flower delivery company daFlores (www.daflores.com), does some of his best keyword research and market research while traveling throughout Latin America.

Because he does business not only with people who live in the region, but also their friends, families and loved ones living in the U.S. and elsewhere, Bustos needs to know how well his website performs in Colombia or Argentina or Mexico. He wants to know both how fast the image of an arrangement will load into an Argentine user’s browser and how well his Spanish-language search engine optimization is performing. (More at Forbes.com)

One detail I left out of the published column: Bustos began focusing on performance partly because it dovetailed with his interest in search engine optimization – particularly after Google changed its ranking formula to give more points to websites that load quickly (the “Caffeine” release of the Google search algorithm).